Jeryon checks the galley’s transom, sweeping white crabs out of his path with his spears: the dinghy is gone. The tracks end at the tide line. Could she have managed to drag something all the way from her cabin with her injuries? Did she get off the island? Was she taken against her will along with their supplies?
Jeryon can’t decide whom he’s more furious at: her for not leaving him any sign of where she’s gone or himself for letting the Hopper go.
He impales several crabs on a spear and runs as best he can to the Crown. He needs the dragon to search the island, but Gray is still unwilling to be approached. She grudgingly accepts the crabs.
Jeryon barely sleeps that night, pacing the expanse of rock and peering across the island for any sign of her or the Hopper’s crew. By morning he’s worked himself into a lather.
Gray is back to normal. Perhaps she’s already forgotten her eggs. She doesn’t glance at them and comes at Jeryon’s whistle. They search the island in a crisscross pattern. They see nothing except blue crabs that don’t realize they’re missing an unprecedented feast at the cabin and on the beach.
Jeryon and Gray circle the island in an ever-widening gyre and find the sea as empty. If she had gotten off the island after the Hopper arrived, she might already be in the League. Could she sail, though? Could she navigate? Would he have seen her on the way to the island, or did he overlook her in the lousy weather? Is she lost right now?
He can’t search the ocean, but he can go to the one place where he knows she would look for him eventually. He’ll find her and bring her back to take care of Gray’s eggs. In the meantime, he’ll deal with Livion and the owners. No more loose ends. No more counting on others to make things go his way. He brings his boats in on time.
Jeryon tends to Gray’s wounds then brings her to the beach so she can fill up on crab before the trip to Hanosh. Disturbingly, she prefers to feed on the corpses.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Junior
1
* * *
Atop the Quiet Tower in Hanosh, a guard named Isco hears a scuffing behind him, then a voice call out, “Who’s there?”
Isco can’t make out whom it is. The moons have withered to new, the wind off the bay has put out the torches again, and firelight from the city won’t bleed past the crenellations. He raises his crossbow and says, “Stand, and show yourself.”
The voice says, “Long live the Guard!” Someone not a guard giggles.
“Bern?” Isco says.
“Who else?” Another guard comes forward.
“Indeed,” Isco says, “who else?” He waves his crossbow toward the door. The faintest of shadows moves. “You come most carefully,” Isco says.
“Bern,” the shadow says with a girl’s voice. “You said there wouldn’t be—”
“Isco,” Bern says, “the clock’s struck twelve. Go to bed.”
Isco lowers his crossbow. “With pleasure. It’s bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.”
“Aw,” the shadow says. “He’s a poet.”
Bern hushes her. “Have you had a quiet guard?” he says.
“Not a mouse stirring,” Isco says. “And if you wish the mice to stay quiet . . .”
“There’s a bottle of warm behind my bunk,” Bern says. “That should salve your heart.”
Isco salutes Bern, then the shadow, which giggles again. Relieved, he goes downstairs.
After the door clicks shut, the shadow pads to Bern and resolves into a maid still wearing her knee-length black chiton. Her bare arms shiver, and she slips beneath his.
“Where’s my bottle of warm?” she says.
“I thought I was,” Bern says. She hits his chest. He hands her a flask. “Now let me salve you,” Bern says. He puts his other arm around her.
She hugs him and pulls away. “You promised to show me something exciting first.”
He takes her hand and leads her to the southwest curve of the tower. The Quiet Tower squats at the end of the West Wall, which slopes downhill protecting the homes of deputies and juniors, functionaries and factotums, that is, the Greater and Lesser Silk, until naked cliffs make it unnecessary.
“There’s my dorm,” she says. The servants’ quarter lies below the tower, eventually bleeding into the warehouses, rope houses, closed houses, taverns, and casinos of the Harbor.
“Not down there,” Bern says and points west across the cliffs. “There. A shadow climbing, maybe flying.”
“I don’t see anything,” she says. “It’s too dark. Have you been putting me on?”
“There was more moon the other night. I heard a strange whooshing too when the shadow came close.”
The maid shivers again. “I can’t hear anything either,” she says. “The wind is too loud.” She takes a pull on the bottle and wraps her arms around her chest. “Do you really stand here all night long? By yourself?”
“Yes,” he says. “When war comes, I may be the first to know. This is probably where I’ll fight too.” He pulls on her arms to unwrap her. “We shouldn’t waste our last doomed hours.”
She twists aside. She wanted to see something wondrous, not think about war. She lifts the bottle then changes her mind. “Can we go inside? Maybe I should go.”
Bern says, “Wait. Did you hear that?”